Clearing out the home office after going back to the office

We haul home office desks, L-shaped and standing desks, office chairs, filing cabinets, bookcases, monitors, printers and old computer towers. Two jobs are yours before we arrive: delete your personal data from anything with a drive, and empty the filing cabinet. Loose batteries stay behind and go to your city's collection program.

A lot of these rooms were set up in a hurry and then used every day for years. Now the job is in an office again, the desk is collecting mail, and the room could be a bedroom, a nursery or a guest room.

What comes out of a home office

The list on one of these jobs is usually longer than people expect, because a home office grew one purchase at a time:

• The desk, often an L-shape or a corner unit
• A standing desk with a motorized frame
• One or two office chairs, plus the chair mat
• A two-drawer or four-drawer filing cabinet
• Bookcases and a wall shelf or two
• Monitors, a docking station and a tangle of cables
• A printer, a scanner and a shredder that stopped shredding a while ago
• An old desktop tower and the laptop before the current one
• Boxes of paper, binders and the packaging the equipment came in

Everything on that list is something we take. The furniture is the easy part. The electronics and the paper are where the preparation matters.

The desk that was built inside the room

Many home office desks are flat-pack furniture that was carried in as a box and assembled in the room. Put together, an L-shaped desk often will not fit back through the doorway it came in through, and some will not make the turn at the top of the stairs.

Our crew handles that on site. They take the desk apart where it can be taken apart, and where the particleboard has already been through one assembly and will not survive a second, they break it down so it leaves in manageable pieces. Old furniture removal, and getting it out of the house goes deeper on the path out, the stairwell and what comes apart cleanly.

A motorized standing desk is heavier than it looks, mostly in the steel frame and the legs. It comes apart at the frame, and the steel goes to a metal recycler.

Your data, before the computer leaves

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality says it plainly on its electronics recycling page: delete any private information from hard drives before donating, reselling or recycling a computer. The EPA's electronics donation and recycling guidance says the same thing, and adds that batteries should come out of electronics because they may need to be recycled separately.

What that looks like at home:

• Back up anything you want to keep.
• Sign out of your accounts on the machine.
• Use the reset or erase option built into the operating system.
• For an old tower with a drive you cannot wipe because it will not boot, pull the drive and keep it, or have a computer shop destroy it.

If the computer belongs to your employer, it is not ours to take and probably not yours to throw away. Company laptops, monitors and docking stations usually go back to the company, so check with your IT department before those end up in the pile.

Loose batteries stay with you

Loose batteries are one thing we leave behind. The EPA's page on used household batteries warns that lithium-ion batteries can start fires even when they look dead, and that they should never go in household garbage or recycling bins. Tape the terminals or bag each battery separately.

Your city handles them. McKinney, for example, accepts lithium and rechargeable batteries through its household hazardous waste and e-waste collection, which residents request before noon the business day before their collection day. The actual pickup date can be up to two weeks out, so ask early. Plano runs its own household chemical collection program, and most nearby cities have something similar.

The same goes for anything chemical that drifted into the office closet: spray adhesive, a can of paint from when the room was last done, compressed-air cans. Those belong in the city program, not in our load.

Where the office furniture and electronics go

Solid wood desks, sturdy bookcases and a good office chair can have a second life with local donation partners. Flat-pack desks that have been assembled once, chairs with a broken gas lift and a chair mat with a crack usually cannot, and they are disposed of. Steel filing cabinets and desk frames go to a metal recycler.

Monitors, printers and towers go into the electronics recycling stream, not the landfill. Texas law also requires computer and TV manufacturers to offer consumers a recycling option, which the TCEQ page above links to, so if you only have one old laptop, that route is worth a look before you book anybody. Appliance and electronics disposal in North Texas covers the rest of the electronics rules, and where your junk goes after pickup explains how a real load gets sorted.

How the job runs

Send a photo of the office, and mention the floor it is on and whether anything is a company device. A crew comes out, looks at what is going, and gives you a firm number before anything is lifted. The quote is the bill, and disposal is included.

Our own crews break down the desk, carry it all out, and sweep the floor where the chair mat used to sit. If the room is turning into a guest room, getting the spare room back before the holidays covers what else usually needs to go. A business clearing an actual suite or storefront is a different job, covered in office and small commercial cleanouts.

We work across the northern suburbs, including Plano, Frisco, McKinney, Allen, Prosper, Little Elm, The Colony, Richardson, Wylie and Fairview, seven days a week. Call before noon and same afternoon is typical, not guaranteed. The service page for this work is furniture removal, and you can send us a photo of the room whenever you are ready.

Frequently asked questions

A cleared home office is a room again. The rest of what we haul is on the services page.